David Brooks, "Hey, Mets! I Just Can’t Quit You.": If We Could Only Go Backwards in Time

I recently spent over a week journeying around the world, and on two of my flights was shown "Moneyball," which is based on the efforts of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, one decade ago, to assemble a low-budget, statistically-generated team that could rival the Yankees. I enjoyed the movie, but must acknowledge that by 2002, I no longer knew the names of any Major League baseball players. Enveloped by the swirling chaos of my life, World Series came and went, and unless I happened upon a headline, I didn't know the winners from year to year.

In his New York Times op-ed entitled "Hey, Mets! I Just Can’t Quit You." (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/opinion/brooks-the-things-we-dont-choose.html?_r=1&hp), David Brooks observes that since 1969, when the "Miracle" Mets won the World Series in their eighth season following the team's creation, he has been a fan for life:

"The neuroscientists might say that, in 1969, I formed certain internal neural structures associated with the Mets, which are forever after pleasant to reactivate. We have a bias toward things that are familiar and especially to those things that were familiar when life was new: the old house, the old hometown, the people, smells and sounds we knew when we were young."

For me, 1969 was that much sweeter, having suffered through the Mets first season in 1962. I remember listening on the radio in the room that I shared with my brother as Casey Stengel's ad hoc collection of players, assembled from an "expansion draft," struggled to go 40-120, the fourth worst record in Major League history. Somewhere in an ancient photo album, I still have signed pictures of manager Stengel and centerfielder Jim Hickman, together with a lock of my first girlfriend's hair.

"Moneyball"? Neuroscience? It wasn't about the money back then or even winning, and I don't know if the wiring of my brain had anything to do with my love for the Mets. That team was simply ours to grow up with, when life was so much simpler.